iStreamItAll Roku Channel, The Elephant in the Room

iStreamItAll, The Elephant in the Room

by:crassh76

There has been a lot of talk the past few months about a newer premium streaming service called iStreamItAll. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with a Co-Founder of ISIA and was able to speak freely with him about many people’s concerns.

The following will contain portions of that interview. This is going to be a raw attempt at this as I am not a professional reporter by any means. I am well aware that this may not be enough proof for some individuals, but you can’t please everyone.

Hopefully this will ease some people’s minds about a great streaming service that many have been curious about or have been longing for on their Roku or Android devices.

Let’s jump right in with the question that's on everyone’s mind!

Is it legal for members to stream ISIA in the U.S.?

"Absolutely! If it wasn't we would have never made the investment. We would be illegal if we were allowing downloads, because that would be distributing, you are simply borrowing a copy of our DVD while watching it, without the hassle of driving it back to the Redbox!"

What is the loophole, so to speak?

"The loophole is to own as many copies as people are watching. If there are 5 people watching a movie at a time, we need to have 5 copies on hand. We have copies to cover enough viewers for anything at any particular time, if we don't we are tied into the distribution center via API to make automatic purchases from them. In the event they don't have enough stock it will remove the media from our listings until someone is done watching it."

Where are ISIA servers located?

"I’ll do what i can to answer what I can. I’m not the sole owner of ISIA, I’m more of the make it work guy. The other guys handle all the business stuff. I do know our servers are located in Canada."

Where is the actual business located?

"The business is registered in France."

Payments go to Vegas though to a sports shop... Can you elaborate?

"I’m running it through my personal proprietary merchant for now while we work on getting a personalized merchant. Because it’s international a lot of U.S. banks decline international payments."

"You don’t really need any information other than a credit card to sign up. IP addresses are attached to Roku's to prevent account sharing, but other than that no, we have no idea who you are, or where you reside."

What about the lawsuit that keeps getting brought up, care to comment on that?

"If people are curious, I guess. The whole lawsuit was supposed to be sealed. They released that the day I signed the settlement trying to scare other website owners.

I basically ran a forum where people would put up those big dishes in there back yard which received free to air satellite, which is perfectly legal. The problem came when forum users started posting files that allowed them to bypass dish networks encryption. The lawsuit portrayed on the internet isn’t how it went down at all.

I could have fought it, but it was legally cheaper to just settle with them to make an example out of our website to others. The amount disclosed isn’t the real number.

It’s no different than a lawsuit Google receives when something pirated shows up in their search engines.

I wasn’t selling anything or anything like that. I never even posted a file myself. The manufactures started posting them and I just kind of let it slide. I didn’t think it was that big of deal. I was wrong...

I didn’t even have a FTA dish at my house when they came, so they knew that wasn’t my intentions. 250k was just a number that I would have to pay if I broke the terms of a settlement. I didn’t have to pay them 250k. It was a civil suit, not a criminal suit.

I could have easily fought it, if I had thousands to pay for a lawyer. I was a kid who didn’t know any better. Just a big corporation bullying me around. I just had to shut the website down, which I didn’t care because it didn’t make any money anyway."

What about SmackDownOnYou?

"That was a buyout I was involved with. Everyone who requested compensation was compensated. This is well documented."

People think ISIA are using torrents because of the lack of closed captions… Any help here?

"We have closed captions, just push the * button on the Roku remote. Not all browsers support closed captioning yet and we aren’t using any special type of player like Netflix does.

There is also an issue of formats. Some browsers will take .vtt , others are .srt. Our most common problem is .sub which is blu ray standard, and converting them has been quite a task to make all of them compatible with one another.

We are understaffed to handle all these things to be honest. We do what we are capable of doing. We are a small company."

The DVD program. What's that all about, can you share the details?

You have so much content already… what can others really offer?

"The DVD program isn’t necessarily just to acquire more content, although it will help in that fashion.It will also help us stay within the confines of having enough copies of stuff as the company grows, and well it's cheaper for us to purchase used than it is new.

A lot of people have bins full of movies that they aren’t using any more, or have just moved on to full digital and don’t need them anymore, so trading a DVD for time or cash is a benefit for both parties. If you earn so much credit from 1 movie, you could potentially watch 20 more.

We haven’t launched the process yet. We are working on an approval process where we are able to make an offer for the collection presented, before accepting it.

We are also working on a way for the end user to be able to print a shipping label right from the ISIA website.

Anyone can sign up. It won’t be required for them to trade in DVDs. Our service runs off of DVDs in the cloud, that’s the whole point of the trade in process. If you trade in a DVD, and say we give you 7 days of IStreamItAll credit for it, you can watch whatever you want during that 7 days. If you have no DVDs to trade in, it’s $15.99 a month for access to the library for unlimited everything.

We wanted to keep the price point right around where it is to stay competitive with Netflix.

Right now for cord cutters, we aren’t trying to be anything more than a supplement to Netflix. We believe a combo of having both services will make it an easy transition for anyone, while not breaking the bank."

How does ISIA have access to the show ER when no one else can get it?

"We own the DVDs. ER was expensive for us to acquire. I’d imagine that’s why no one else has invested in it."

Are you saying Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon can't afford it but ISIA can?

"No. Not at all. They license directly through the studio, while we buy DVDs, compared to them we are a micro pinch. While we might only need to purchase 10-20 of the box sets to cover everyone who’s watching at any given time, they would need thousands, so it’s cheaper for them to just lease the content right from the studio, which I imagine they want a pretty big chunk of change for it because it’s a popular series."

"When Netflix was having contract issues with Warner Brothers, they made a threat to them that they will start buying retail DVDs publically. That’s how iStreamItAll was thought of."

What does ISIA want to say to all the haters?

"You are all missing out on one of the greatest streaming services to date, and when we have enough funding to go fully public, you will be kicking yourself in the butt that you didn’t hop on the train a couple years ago!"

What can we expect in the future?

"Currently we are working on 5.1 surround sound and 4K. We’ll keep you posted on our progress."

I cut this down a bit. It was 14 pages initially. I hope this helps ease some of your minds. Again, I know it won’t fully satisfy everyone.

The one thing I really do enjoy about this service is that it has an auto-play next episode option that doesn’t ask “Are you still watching” like another well known streaming service. It also has a Favorites option for all your favorite shows so you don’t have to go hunting for them.

I find this channel/app to be an incredible value for most of your current and classic TV and movie needs. You can definitely lose yourself searching through their entire library.